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I was trucking down South Washington Street with my little boys tonight when I spotted this sign. In the past when I’ve driven past Cornerstone I’ve noticed other humorous witticisms, but this one I found particularly funny.

I know we all hope there isn’t much winter left, but I finally decided to put together some links to the songs on my current Winter Playlist. Thanks to that lovely Internet, I can share these songs with you either via YouTube or iTunes. If you find a broken link, let me know.

In looking over the list, I realized a couple of things:

My tastes over winter tend a little toward the electronic, but not exclusively;

I seem to favor a certain style female vocalists in the winter;

I tend to choose more ethereal or wistful music.

I figure a lot of this is because it gets dark early during winter, and it’s more a matter of how the darkness affects my mood. Some of these songs, though, have a sentimental attachment from my time working for Mountain Operations for a ski resort out in the Rockies. Snowboarding for a living when you’re in your late teens and early twenties is a real blast if you can pull it off – just make sure you get back to college after your sabbatical!

Anyway, here’s the list. No particular order. If you don’t like one, move on to the next. Feedback appreciated.

UPDATE: I forgot a couple of songs, so I’ve added them to the beginning of the list.

I couldn’t resist. I felt like the last time I was here, the time was too short. I’d visited once with my cameras and once with my boys, but I never really felt like I got to bond with the spinning ice disc on the Heart River. So, after work on Monday I decided to bolt over and grab some stills and video of it at dusk.

I got the perfect match of dusk and cloud cover, bathing everything in very nice, flat, even light. The absence of hard shadows allowed me to capture detail that would otherwise be lost in glare or contrast.

I decided to put together a brief video of the evening:

I have to admit that my curiosity will take me back there again a time or two. I can’t help but wonder how long that rotating disc will survive the ups and downs of this unusual North Dakota winter. Whatever I find, rest assured I’ll share my finds here.

After we got done with the video gig for the bull riding last night, I decided to get a photo of this giant spinning ice disk. A friend with Mandan PD told me where to find it, so I ventured out to get a nice nighttime shot of it. I’ve seen video of it on TV and Facebook as well as a few photos, but I wanted to see if I could add my own perspective to it. Pretty cool!

It’s supposed to be warm today…I wonder if this will survive the warmth?

So this weekend I saw a Facebook link to web article expressing outrage at a video in which Oprah purportedly makes the comment portrayed in the graphic above. Well, that’s provocative. While it’s implying something she didn’t mean, it also highlights something that Oprah isn’t counting on. First, let’s point out what even the article admits she said:

“There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die,” she proclaimed.

So what Oprah isn’t saying is that all white people should just die. We get that. But she’s still tragically mistaken.

What she’s saying is that there are generations of people alive right now who grew up with racism, and that they’re probably never going to see things differently. Her hope, as I infer from the quote, is that when those people eventually pass away that racism will die with them. Sounds like a plausible idea and a reasonable hope. But there’s a problem.

Liberal progressive leftist Democrats have instituted a replacement for that racism in the form of modern day Racism™. Race is an industry now, and business is booming. These days, simply disagreeing with a leftist of any origin is immediately Racist™, and actual race doesn’t even need to be involved. It’s gotten so bad that Godwin’s Law may have to be clarified to add “Racist” alongside “Nazi” as a reflexive insult when someone is losing an argument.

The generation(s) to which Oprah is referring will be gone someday. Unfortunately they will have been replaced with a battered and fatigued generation of Racists™ who may not even understand the history of race relations in the United States. They certainly won’t be living in realization of Dr. King’s dream, where people are “judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”. Sadly, you can thank the left for that…the very people who claim to be the most compassionate and the most color blind. From inside Oprah’s bubble, I doubt she’s got the slightest clue what’s coming.

What do you do if you’re an idiot and you find something on the sandbar by the river? Well, you light it on fire, of course…which is apparently what happened to this vehicle either when it met its untimely demise or when someone with a lighter found it.

Naturally there’s nothing left of the interior. What wasn’t stolen before the fire is gone now.

Naturally I called to report this as soon as I found it. I’m sure someone had already done so, but I wanted to make sure. As if a flaming Cavalier (well, more flaming than usual) wouldn’t have attracted attention long, long ago…

I’m accustomed to finding decades-old cars, or remnants thereof, at the bottom of these cliffs, but I never expected to find a modern day econobox car. I haven’t been back since that November day, so I don’t know if anything’s been done about it. I just wish people would treat the area with more respect.

It’s been longer than I can remember since I’ve been out to capture a sunrise. It’s about time to start doing that more often, and yesterday was a new beginning for me. I was initially discouraged since the sky was mostly covered with dense clouds, but the horizon held some promise. I stopped for a cappuccino at B&J and headed east. This is what I found developing.

Even though there was a mere sliver of clear sky on the horizon, it was doing its work to difract beautiful red, pink, and orange colors on the clouds above. I set up shop and waited for the drama to start…

Although the purple and red sunrise photo was enough to make my day a success, I hung around a little bit to see what would happen before the sun climbed past the available window. I was not disappointed. The blazing orange sky that resulted was nothing short of breathtaking. The ripple of low clouds between the sun and me became a perfect reflector for the fiery hues.

Looks like rolling fire, doesn’t it? This is the most dramatic part of a sunrise and also the most fleeting. I’ve seen photos of this pop up all over Facebook, rightly so. The intensity was amazing.

After a couple of minutes of this, the colors began to wane and I headed back to town satisfied. This was a fantastic way to start getting back into the swing of things. I’m going through my selection of GPS waypoints and other notes to recall suitable foreground objects for sunrise silhouettes, and as the sky cooperates I hope to bring more sunrises home with me.

I was out running errands on my way home and happened to see an interesting alignment of Venus, Mercury, and the moon as I was near the capitol. I whipped around to the northwest path on the grounds, took out a camera and tripod, and caught the three celestial bodies arranged around the tower.

Tinfoil-hat liberal groups are active as ever in North Dakota, and they were in full batscat-crazy mode this week at a hearing for modifying the state’s legal levels of TENORM (technologically enhanced, naturally occurring radioactive materials if I remember correctly). At the forefront is the Dakota Resource Council. One of their minions made a comment that caught my eye immediately. According to the Tribune:

Kathryn Hilton, of DRC, challenged the Argonne study because it used computer models instead of testing radioactivity levels from affected sites.

Well, now…wait a minute. Someone should point out to Ms. Hilton that, according to her fellow advocates, computer models are gospel. That’s what they’ve been insisting for twenty years or more in order to advance us toward global socialism (the only purported cure for global coolingwarming climate change).

The only way one can “prove” that American SUVs are causing global coolingwarmingclimate change is by programming computer models to say so. That assumption is “baked in” when the simulations and models are first constructed. That’s how scientists can be so confounded at the lack of warming which their models predictably foretold, yet bears no correlation to the actual data.

In other words – no, in Kathryn Hilton’s words, computer models are not the same as actual observations and data…two things that don’t bear out the AGW (American-made Global Warming) theory. Yes, theory.

Just this week I was engaged in a discussion where it was pointed out that none of these liberal positions have a leg to stand on in that they have to constantly violate their own precepts in order to adapt their “logic” to fit the premise of the day. If the liberal mind was made into a city, it’d be an impossible place to navigate since there would be no two-way streets. This single quote, while largely unnoticed, is a perfect example.

The sky only allowed us a few minutes, and it was cold and breezy outside, but there was a pretty good sunset the other day. I had my littlest guy with me and handed him one of my cameras so he could accompany me in style on a brief photo jaunt between errands. I looked on the camera’s card yesterday and found this shot. Pretty darn good for a young boy with no training! I didn’t have to level it or crop it. I added a touch of saturation because my old 20D is set to produce very neutral photos, but that’s it.

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Scripture

In the day when I cried thou answeredst me, and strengthenedst me with strength in my soul...The LORD will perfect that which concerneth me: thy mercy, O LORD, endureth for ever: forsake not the works of thine own hands.
-- Psalm 138:3,8